Spray wire rack with no-stick spray. Place pan in bottom rack setting of oven. (To collect drippings.) Put wire rack in the first rack setting over cooking pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes. Move wire rack to the top spot of the oven. (Careful, use kitchen mitts.) Increase temperature to 425 degrees and broil for 6 minutes. Turn poppers over and broil for another 6 minutes or until bacon is crispy.

TIDBITS

1) Confederate Armies during the Civil War subsisted on taste-free crackers. Union forces, however, feasted on scrumptious BWJCPs. This difference in diet gave Billy Yank s a morale boost over Johnny Reb. Indeed, Billy Yank would taunt his foes by tossing BCWJCPs high in the air. The Southern will to fight soon crumbled. Bitter Southerners would not forget. They practiced passing long distances in the hopes of establishing football supremacy should that sport ever be invented. This is why Southern Universities have won one national football title after another.

1) I was tempted to write, “Toss ingredients,” but I recently saw a football movie and I kept picturing someone tossing the poppy pasta down the length on the kitchen.

2) Pasta football almost caught on during World War II. Real football production had ceased in 1942 due to wartime restrictions. Real footballs became harder and harder to find.

3) Professional football merged to conserve the nation’s dwindling supply of real footballs.

4) But the fans in the cities that lost their teams still wanted to see professional football. Patriotic Polish-American chefs came up with the poppy pasta football. It was enough for the football starved fans. In 1944, the PPPFL, Polish Poppy Pasta Football League was formed.

5) The league was comprised of franchises from: St. Louis, Poway, California, Keokuk, Illinois, Madison, Wisconsin, Taos, New Mexico, and Biloxi, Mississippi. The league did not thrive. The poppy pasta football kept disintegrating in the rain.

6) Then on November 17, 1944 with Keokuk losing to Poway 44 to 13 and three minutes left, Keokuk quarterback, Chris Gashud ate the last football. No football, no more playing. There were no rules to cover this. The game was considered to be the same as a rainout. Losing teams took their cue from this incidents and ate the pasta ball in the final minutes of game after game. The league folded in late December.

7) Isn’t Gashud Swedish for “gooseflesh?” Yes, it is.

– Chef Paul

My cookbook, Eat Me: 169 Fun Recipes From All Over the World, and novels are available in paperpack or Kindle on amazon.com

Makes 18 cookies. Takes 15 minutes to make dough, to sit overnight in refrigerator, and maybe 1 hour to make the cookies, plus 15-to-20 minutes each time you put cookie sheets in the oven. You will get better and faster at putting the dough in the speculaas mold, trimming the dough with the sewing thread, and getting the dough out of the mold and onto the cookie sheet in one piece. While getting the hang of things, I say chill out and have some wine to calm yourself down. Note, the upper limit of drinks is for those who use speculaas or other embossed cookie molds. If you just plop down some dough, you only get one glass. There you go.

PREPARATION

Add butter and sugar to first, large mixing bowl. Mix using electric beater set on CREAM until butter/sugar mix becomes creamy. Add egg. Mix with electric beater set on CAKE until well blended. Add baking powder, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg to second, small mixing bowl. Mix together with whisk. Add spice mix from second, small mixing bowl and flour to first, large mixing bowl. Knead mixture until it forms a firm dough ball. Refrigerate dough ball overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Dust speculaas mold for each cookie. Press dough into mold. Gently trim all dough above the line of mold with sewing thread. The top of the dough should be flush with the top of the mold.

Turn mold over and rap it against the cookie sheet. The dough should come out easily and intact if the mold was sufficiently dusted with flour. If not, gently, slowly pull dough out of the mold. If it the shaped dough comes apart in only one or two spots, gently smoosh the pieces together with your fingertip. If someone happens to see this and makes a snarky remark, hit the oaf on its head with the wine bottle. Bake cookies at 350 degrees for 15-to-25 minutes or until cookies turn golden brown.

TIDBITS

1) The first weekend of September is the Redhead Festival in Breda, Netherlands. It started as a local photographer’s quest to find a redhead model. It soon got out of hand. Well, sort of. Redheads walk around seeing other redheads. They even celebrate the color red.

2) It could have so exciting. Why not really celebrate the color red by having tomato fights?

3) Or have ketchup wrestling. That would draw a big crowd.

4) Or have professional drivers race around Breda in red fire trucks instead of race cars.

5) Or let tourists do high diving into a pool of tomato soup.

6) Or hold a contest to build the highest pyramid out of red bell peppers.

7) Or have a contest to eat the most habañero peppers.

8) Or even celebrate ginger. Redheads are often called gingers.

9) Who wouldn’t want to enter a contest to see who could eat the most buttered ginger toast?

10) Go bowling with tomatoes. Professional tomato bowlers recommend a perfectly round. The flattish, not entirely round ones do not go as straight as the perfectly round ones. You’ll never knock down any pins with your tomato if it heads straight for the gutter. Oh, it must be said that the typical tomato has no finger holes as opposed to the standard three-hole bowling ball. This makes tomato bowling even more challenging.

11) Play golf with ginger root! Be careful not to hit your ginger in the woods. It blends in with the leaves. You’ll never find it.

12) Even better, play basketball with tomatoes! Given that tomatoes would make a big splat the first time the ball handler batted the tomato to the ground, fears of players getting away with uncalled double dribbles would be thing of the past.

12) Play football with tomatoes! Since tomatoes are so fragile, soft hands for the quarterback and receivers would be a must.

13) Stage your own bullfights. All you need is a red tablecloth and fast feet.

14) What about ten tons of tomatoes and a bulldozer? Revelers get five minutes on the machine, or fewer if they miss the tomatoes and run into a building.

– Chef Paul

My cookbook, Eat Me: 169 Fun Recipes From All Over the World, and novels are available in paperpack or Kindle on amazon.com

2) Indeed Cal Tech used to have a cheer that went:
Tangent, secant, cosine, sine
Three point one four one five nine.

3) Cal Tech is renowned for the scientific prowess of their alumni. It is not nearly as well respected for its football teams. However in 1968, Cal Tech’s footballers did defeat my school, UC San Diego.

4) After that humiliation, the UCSD student body voted to not offer anymore football scholarships, partly because UCSD wanted to concentrate more on academics and intramural sports, partly to save money, and mostly because we could certainly field a team that could lose to Cal Tech without giving scholarships to the players.

5) The students were wrong. Without scholarships, not enough prospects showed up next year to field a team. UCSD dropped football. And so it goes.